Photoshop CS5 Shortcuts for Professionals

In today’s article, we shall take a look at the Photoshop CS5 shortcuts which professionals use to perform tasks of hours in minutes. This article can also be considered as a list of tips and tricks for Adobe Adobe Photoshop CS5.

Many of these shortcuts were provided in comments section of the last post. So I’m writing the commentator’s names in italics at the end of their tips.

Thanks to all of our precious commentators, who took out time to write such valuable comments, I had to promise another article similar in context but this time, intended for the professionals. YET, even the very beginners would learn a lot from this article, so if you are one, keep on reading.

This post is also made in the same manner as the previous post. It is distributed into two sections, First Covers the shortcuts related to Tools, second section is for the Workspace (everything except tools).

Note: I’m sharing all of the tips and shortcuts shared by our Commentators, except for the ones which do not work in Adobe Photoshop CS5. I have tested all these shortcuts on Photoshop CS5 Extended.

Tools

This article is made on the footsteps of the previous one. We are first describing the shortkeys… I mean shortcuts which relate to the tools in the toolbar. Later we’ll check out everything else.

• CTRL+SHIFT+ > increases and CTRL+SHIFT+ < decreases the font size when it is selected by a text tool.

By Ali Raza

• Press and hold the shortkey of any tool, and use the newly active tool …. when you are done with it, release the shortkey, the active tool is switched back to previous one.

By Ali Raza

• Alt+Right Click and dragging in an active document will resize the brush/pencil/eraser tools.

• CTRL + 4 (RGB)/5(CMYK) and up to show only alpha channels in the order they were created in.

• CTRL + Z is undo/redo, everyone knows that, but for stepping back more than one step, CTRL + ALT + Z steps back through history…CTRL + ALT + Y.

By ~AR

• CTRL+J duplicates the current Layer while you have nothing selected.

If you have any active selection and press CTRL+J, the selected area will be copied to the new layer. If you press SHIFT+CTRL+J when you have something selected, it will be cut out and put on a new layer.

• Scrolling (with your mouse scroll) moves the document up and down. CTRL+Scroll moves it left and right.

• ALT+Click on the visibility icon of a layer to hide all other layers.

• CTRL+TAB to switch between open windows.

By Paratron

• Ctrl+Alt+Shift+E will merge all visible layers into the newly created layer. Also Ctrl+E will merge selected layers.

By Blair

• Ctrl+Alt+2 It selects tonal range higher than 50% (look at the histogram).
You can easily reverse it with Ctrl+Shift+I

By Stoyan Kostov

• ALT+[ GO DOWN THROUGH LAYERS ALT+] GO UP

• CTRL+[ MOVE TARGET LAYER DOWN CTRL+] MORE TARGET LAYER UP

By Ali Raza

• Ctrl+[ Moves layer downwards. Ctrl+] Moves layer upwards.

• Ctrl+Shift+[ Moves the layer to the bottom of current group. Ctrl+Shift+] Moves the layer to the top of current group.

Final Words

I would like to thank all you guys again for providing half of the material for this post. I hope to see the same kind of involvement from you in all our future posts. And please, keep up your feedback. It is only your feedback which could enhance the quality of Designzzz.